Providing meaningful responses to queries is a difficult task. This is especially true in cases such as search engines where queries are typically quite brief (for example, a single word), and provide little or no context from which the desired subject matter for a query can be deduced. One way to try to address this problem is to allow the use of formal syntax, such as Boolean logic, so that queries can be specified more precisely. However, in many cases information retrieval tools will be operated by individuals who are not comfortable or familiar with Boolean logic or other specialized syntaxes, so providing support for those syntaxes is, at best, a partial solution. Further, even when a user is able to use an appropriate syntax to specify a query, whether the response to the query is meaningful depends both on the user's ability to accurately translate his or her goal into the proper syntax, and on the relationship of that syntax to the information corpus from which the response is drawn. Accordingly, there is a need for improvements in the technology used to provide responses to queries.